Michael Collins

Collins fought in the Easter Rising of 1916, was interned, and concluded that a rebellion holding fixed positions against an empire could not win. In the war that followed he ran the intelligence side: he recruited clerks and detectives inside Dublin Castle, read the government's own files, and organised the killing of its intelligence officers, while moving openly around the city on a bicycle with a price on his head. The British administration could not identify him from a photograph for most of the war.

In 1921 he was sent to London to negotiate, which he regarded as a trap laid for him by colleagues who preferred not to sign what could be got. The treaty created an Irish Free State with dominion status, an oath to the crown and a partitioned north; he said on signing it that he had perhaps signed his own death warrant. The country split, and the civil war that followed set former comrades against each other. He was killed in an ambush in his native County Cork ten months later, at thirty-one. Half a million people came to his funeral in Dublin.